A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  His eyes shone, glittered with memory. Feldman felt he should say something, call for order. Though no one made a sound, it was as if there had been a sudden displacement of passion in the room, like the pressure of the first thighs against a barricade.

  “Nevada is right,” a convict said.

  “He’s wrong.”

  “No, he’s right. Only he’s got too narrow a sense of it. I’m a rustler—horses, cattle. The feel of flesh is what I like, the mass of beast. All that muscle. All that meat. Like an appointment at the source of things. It was nothing for me to steal a hundred tons, two hundred, three. Think of the weight of such a theft.”

  “Booty is bulk and bulk booty,” a convict heckled.

  “The nostrils,” the rustler said, raising his voice above their laughter, “that wild gristle. The rheumy eyes, their mucky silts. Those dreadful genitals and those steamy hides.”

  “I don’t understand any of that,” another prisoner said quietly, “but if it’s the wide-open spaces that Nevada was talking about, or that Tex here meant when he said he agreed with him, I can see the reasoning.”

  “I’m a poacher,” a prisoner said. “In my time I’ve fished other men’s rivers and killed the deer in other men’s woods. There’s nothing beats nature, men. I’m a bit of a squatter too. I’ve done some squatting. I nick myself off a piece of their land, and they never miss it, don’t know it’s gone.”

  “Kentucky, you piker, you make me ashamed,” a fourth man said. “I’m a sooner. I steal land. Vast tracts in Alaska. In Hawaii vast tracts. Land, steal land. I jump the gun and beat the bell and move before the whistle. I’ve made a living out of always being offside, and I tell you there’s nothing like it. The race is always to the swift.”

  “I know about that,” said a fifth convict. “I trespass too. But deeper than you boys. Down, deep down in the mines. I jump other men’s claims. I move in and take over. It’s work, but rewarding. I hate the sluice robber. He’s meager. I tell him to his face.”

  I’m in Hell, Feldman thought. I’m the president of Hell. How had he ever imagined these men to be indifferent?

  “Well, you’re all out of touch, it seems to me. You live in the past. The mines are played out. There’s detergent in the rivers and streams. Tourists in the forests pose the bears. Myself, I’m an artist.” The forger was speaking. “There’s got to be some art to crime. It’s show biz. Catch me with a gun? The rough stuff is out. Jazz and pizzazz are what’s wanted today. Me, I forge license plates. I’m a sort of a sculptor.”

  “He’s right.”

  “He’s wrong.”

  “No, he’s right. I dress up as a cop. I impersonate dames.”

  “I make my own moon.”

  “I fake petitions, a nickel a name. A dime for addresses. It’s very satisfying to make up people and where they live. Listen to this: Wilma Welfing Pearsall, 7614 Carboy Street, Marples, Ohio. Jerome Loss, Rural Route Two, Clegg, New York. Ed and Naomi Baird, Apartment 404, the Sinclair Apartments, 160 Clipton Drive, Archer Hills, Oregon. I don’t mess with the zip code. Federal offense.”

  “I give false measure,” a convict said.

  “And I was a dentist who short-changed on teeth. I’d water the silver, adulterate gold. Delicious my fillings; they’d melt in your mouth.”

  “I worked for a real estate firm. I seeded treasure in vacant lots for the suckers to see. I buried coins and statues and place settings for twelve—that sort of thing.”

  A very small convict stood up. “I made the stock certificates that the con men sell,” he said. “Suitable for framing, they were. On a thin parchment, very expensive. The paper around the borders like the rough edges of the pages in old novels. Painstaking. I tore it myself. And a seal like a sunset or a harvest moon. A great wheel of a seal. Very official. Barbed at the circumference, the full three hundred sixty degrees.

  “And the types. Hand-lettered. Glorious stuff: roman, italic, old-style roman, old-style italic. Cursive and minion. Sans serif, nonpareil. Brevier, bourgeois, and brilliant and canon. Columbian, English, excelsior too. And what we call the stones: diamond and pearl and agate. And primer I did. And great primer. Pica, of course, and small pica and double pica, and double-small pica as well. And much of this, you understand, in condensed and even extra-condensed. (To discourage the reading, I guess. I didn’t ask questions.) Only the great fictive companies themselves in extra-bold black letter. But almost illegible. Like a sketch of chop suey.

  “But what I liked best were the pictures I drew. Spidery, thin as a watermark, of old engines, old cars. And a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, I took off a soap wrapper. And a factory after the one on the box of Shredded Wheat.” He sighed.

  “Yes,” said a distinguished-looking convict. “I know the feeling. I was a quack. I worked with machines. I had an electrodynathermy machine, a honey. And an adgitronic nucleosiscope, cost me two thousand dollars. Also a honey. And I had this vibrating wooden box with insets for the patient’s hands. He’d wear coated rubber gloves and press down hard for fifteen minutes at a time for an advanced cancer. Less for something not so serious.

  “I loved to watch the colored lights. There was no special sequence. I liked to hear the hum it made, the whiz and whir, the crackles, and crepitations and thuds. I don’t see the harm. I did a lot of good and may even have effected some cures, I think.”

  “He’s wrong.”

  “No, he’s right. Doc’s right.”

  “He’s wrong. Two thousand dollars for a piece of equipment? Seeding all those miles of vacant lot? I don’t care how shallow a man buries that stuff, it’s backbreaking work. Or all those hours over a draughtsman’s board. Just take a look at the glasses that guy wears, not to mention the condition of his lungs from breathing those inks.

  “No. Get in and get out. That’s what I say. Who needs all those props? Sure there’s satisfaction in the artist’s life, but we live in a practical world. Profit margins and overhead and cost per unit have got to be thought about. My money’s on the middleman. I’m a suborner myself. I can give you statistics. It costs me anywhere from five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars to fix a judge today, depending, of course, on the offense and the defendant’s prospects of being convicted. All right, let’s take a closer look. We’ll take a relatively modest case: a white kid accused of a car theft. A first offense, and the kid’s from a nice middle-class family, say. It costs three thousand dollars to get that boy off. Of that three thousand I take home a grand, the judge fifteen hundred, and the rest is divided up between the officers of the court and expert witnesses like the social worker or the arresting officer. Notice that the judge gets more than I do. That’s important. I do that on purpose. And I’m pretty careful to let him know it too. Something like the same principle holds for the law clerks and the others. I know the judge’s unlisted number. That isn’t the point. I could reach him direct. The thing is, I try to implicate as many people as I can. I bring in the middlemen. If a conspiracy is wide enough no one gets hurt.”

  “Me, I’m a fence. I receive stolen goods I might never see. I buy up a thousand transistor radios and never lay eyes on a single one. I don’t want to see it. I make a few phone calls, tell the trucks where to go.”

  “Did you ever hear of champerty?” another man asked. “That’s what I do. I’m a party to law suits that don’t concern me. I bankroll a plaintiff. I buy him his x-rays. We split on the judgment. Some grievances I invent, I make up offenses. It goes back before Coke, the old common law.”

  Feldman wondered why he had thought he should call for order before. There had been order. It was as ordered in here as a pageant or masque. Even the chairs made a circle.

  “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” a man said.

  “The chair recognizes the pirate,” Feldman mumbled. Pegleg’s wrong, he thought. No, he’s right. He’s wrong and he’s right.

  A prisoner rose and spoke of hijacking the big rigs, of ambush at crossroads and hazardous tailgating through the mou
ntains, broadside duels on dangerous turns at sixty miles an hour. Another agreed and told of how he put up false lights in treacherous waters to lure the shipping and then scavenged the wrecked vessels. A third was a rumrunner, a fourth the leader of bandits in caves in the hills who stole from the tourists. There was a bartender who worked for a ring of white slavers on the waterfront. He slipped Mickey Finns into the girls’ drinks. He showed how he winked a signal to a man at the jukebox when they collapsed on the stool. The appeal, they agreed, was in the strategy, the sense of maneuver, of logistics, the idea of government itself perhaps, some rich, loyal, aggressive joy taken in gangs and bands and mobs and rings.

  A sour-looking convict got up to speak. “Crimes of anger,” he said. “Crimes of rage. What else is motivated? Give me spiters, men with grudges.” He told of barns he had burned, ricks he had put to the torch, the pets of enemies he had poisoned.

  A young man stood up. He rolled the fairies, he said. He beat up the drunks. Another beat his wife and children. Someone else exhumed the dead; “I hate the lousy dead,” he said.

  A man rose shyly. “I tried to kill myself and botched it. Suicide’s against the law, you know, although you don’t hear much about them putting a failed suicide in jail. I guess I’m an exception—an example to people. The psychiatrist says I probably didn’t really want to die if I couldn’t make it stick, but that’s not true. I want to die, I think, but that’s beside the point. What attracts me is the violence, the prose of the notes I leave behind, the halting syntax and the confessions and the passionate accusations. But even that isn’t the real point. It’s the other thing, the violence. I love the feel of the gun butt, the hard, quilted iron. The handles of knives too. Clubs. Whips. There’s a packed solidity in weapons, a center of gravity. You get a sense of lumps of power in your hands. The force is terrific. A hangman’s knot in a rope—like a full gorge—is the same. And poison. Discreet. The pills seem to weigh eighty pounds. And then there’s the pain you feel. All that power to inflict injury, and all that capacity to absorb it. That’s all there is. You know?”

  “I bugger sheep,” a man said. “I give it to sows and dogs. How do you like that? A man and his dog. I ride horseback on the bridle path in the park, and I come in my pants. What do you think about that? How low can a man get?”

  Then there was a reckless driver, and another man whose pilot’s license had been taken away because he had buzzed his own home for three hours, until he was out of gas and had to make a forced landing on a ballfield where his own kid was playing.

  One last convict stood up. “I shouldn’t be here at all,” he said. “What I did was an accident. It couldn’t be helped.

  “I was a laborer. I had a job in this factory in my hometown. We made switches for an outfit that turned out radios and television sets. Half the people in town worked there, maybe more. Then the home office decided to close down the plant. It wasn’t economical, they said, to have the switches made in a place a thousand miles away. They relocated the engineers and a few of the foremen and let the rest of us go. There wasn’t any work in town. I did odd jobs, but everybody was doing odd jobs. All the men. The competition was fierce. I had my family to support. We all did. It got to where I wouldn’t lend my tools to my own neighbor for fear he’d find some way to use them that would do me out of a day’s work. And I couldn’t borrow his paintbrushes. I only wanted to touch up the woodwork, thinking maybe I could sell my house, but he figured different. He thought I had this paint job somewhere. He begged me to tell.

  “We lived like that six months. A summer, a fall. And always the money getting harder and harder, and the kids so hungry you could see their hunger happening. Then, in the winter, I heard there was work a hundred miles away. A plant was hiring and I figured to go. I saved for the gas and couldn’t make it, and had to beg it off a guy I knew in the one station in town still open. Out on the highway? He gave it to me and I was all set to go, and a storm come up. A terrible storm. The worst I’ve seen. It rained so you couldn’t see to drive, and my wipers was bad. I waited for it to stop, but it didn’t. Three hours later it hadn’t let up. And they was only hiring for five days. One had passed when I heard, three more while I looked for the gas. I only had hours. I had to try.

  “So I drove in the rain. Maybe ten miles an hour, and it come down harder, and even harder. I couldn’t see, it was as if I was blindfold. And straining my eyes. I had to pull up. I had to stop. I moved to the shoulder and waited again. Lord, I was tired. Up before dawn. Straining my eyes. Worried like that. Lord, I was tired. But I didn’t dare close my eyes. If I slept and it stopped? So I waited and watched. Two hours, three. And I prayed: God, make it stop. Make it stop, please.

  “Then all of a sudden it did. It stopped, it was over. Do you know what I saw? What I saw up ahead? It was clear. It was dry. It hadn’t rained there at all.

  “I started my car and got stuck in the mud. I heaved it and hauled, I pulled it away. With my rage, with my strain, I was tired as hell. As weary I think as a man’s ever been. I got in the car and stepped on the gas. Two hours I had before the plant closed. My God, how I drove, how I flew down the road. But my tiredness grew, enormous it was. And just for a second I rested my eyes—

  “The accident happened but ten miles from town. Doing eighty and ninety, the witnesses said. I swerved from my lane and hit them broadside. His family was killed, but I was thrown clear. How does that happen? Was it my prayer?

  “I landed unconscious, or maybe asleep, but here is the miracle: I woke up refreshed! Mind clear, alert, fresh as a daisy, I guess you could say. And only for minutes had I been out.

  “I saw what had happened and sent for the cops. I waited and helped, but there was nothing to do. A baby, a daughter, a wife and a son. The father alive but damaged real bad. Crippled for life and can’t move his arms. Can’t pass his water or chew his own food.

  “He sued me, of course. Took me to court. I had no insurance or he would have been rich.

  “Well, that’s about it, but there is something else. Refreshed, I keep thinking, I came to refreshed. After the guilt, after the grief. After all that, the fear that I felt, the being in trouble and down on my luck, there’s still something else. The impact, the bang, the damage I did. The crippling, the terror, the spilling of life. The joy I keep feeling, the excitement, delight. The sense that I have of some final deed done. The cleanness I feel, the absence of stain.”

  The convict sat down, and the rest of the prisoners were silent.

  “He’s right,” one said at last.

  “Yes,” murmured another.

  “Yes,” still another added, “he’s right.”

  “He’s right, he’s right.” They took up the call.

  “He’s right,” said the poacher. “He’s right,” said the fence. “He’s right,” said the ghoul. “He’s right,” said the quack and the man who set fires for spite. “He’s right,” the hijacker agreed and the man who screwed pigs.

  President Feldman rose and they all looked toward him. “No,” he said. “He’s wrong.” He told them about his basement.

  16

  Feldman invented the basement by accident, a great serendipity. But afterwards nothing was an accident. He meant every word, every move. So, in a way, the flukishness could be written off. It can almost be said there was nothing accidental about it.

  When he had rejected the developer, that kind guy, that gentle jerk and nonbarbarian, he was pretty blue there for a while. He didn’t know where to turn. Very low. Rock-bottom. Feldman, the felled man. Who found himself—what, so down was he, was accidental about this?—in the basement of his store. On holy chthonic ground. And there one day in the record department, scolding a kid who had undone the perfect plastic envelope in which the album had been sealed, he was approached by a nervous young man in a tweed overcoat. “Excuse me,” said the young man. “I’m looking for a record.”

  Feldman was about to tell him to ask the clerk—do you see how low, how miserable?�
�when something about the young man made him stop. His manner, apparently halting, was not really timid at all. It was as if his shyness had been assumed as a courtesy. Feldman listened. “Do you have the records of Mildred Eve?” he asked. Was that all? Feldman wondered. He went to the catalog to look her up, but she wasn’t listed. “She wouldn’t be in the catalog,” the young man said. “She sings party songs.”

  Feldman called his distributor. “Why haven’t you been sending me the Mildred Eve records? Do you know how many sales I’ve lost because I don’t have them?”

  “Mildred Eve?” the distributor said. “She sings filth. Her stuff is sold under the counter.”

  Feldman ordered all her releases and put them on top of the counter. He had the records played on the stereo equipment so that they could be heard all over the basement.

  A strange thing happened. Whether because of the music or for some other reason, the tone of the store gradually changed. This was his sense of it, at any rate. There began to appear in the basement certain listless men who seemed to be on lunch breaks, well dressed enough, and carrying briefcases, many of them, but giving off an impression of loitering. There were boys too, wiry and underweight, who seemed to have stepped from morning movies at the downtown theaters. They strolled the aisles of his basement, the rolled sleeves of their tee shirts making pockets for their cigarettes, and dropped their butts without stepping on them. The women seemed to have changed too, to have become faintly aimless, like people killing time in bus stations.